A number of years ago, when Hewlett-Packard started deploying a lot of Linux internally, some smart nerds at the company invented a set of tools and gold images, called the Common Operating Environment, to help control deployments of Windows and Linux within its departments and data centers. Last year, the Linux portion of the toolset, called LinuxCOE, which was the result of six years of internal development at HP, was released under an open source license. Last week, that LinuxCOE tool was enhanced with a 4.0 release.

LinuxCOE can manage the installation of over 100 different Linux distributions, and can be made to create custom variants of just about any Linux distro you can name. LinuxCOE is available in binary form through a non-HP site called InstaLinux and the source code for the tool is available at www.linuxcoe.sourceforge.net.

According to Jeffrey Wade, worldwide Linux marketing manager at HP's cross-divisional Open Source and Linux Organization (OSLO), LinuxCOE 4.0 has been expanded and updated for all of the most recent Linux releases from the commercial Linux distributors. The tool has also been tweaked so it can manage the provisioning and installation of a single Linux image to multiple desktops or servers at the same time. LinuxCOE 4.0 has also been tweaked to include the network-aware Yum application package manager and patch tool.

Wade says that HP has provisioned over 15,000 desktops and servers using the LinuxCOE tool inside HP itself. The tool is also used in Linux services and server sales engagements.